Progressives today do not want to discuss their history. I want to discuss their history.

Main menu

Post navigation

Epilogue: The Moving Finger Writes

Sweet are the uses and perquisites of political office, even for those who declare their sole aim is to free humanity from its age-old burden of misery. In America, Hubert Humphrey, whose heart bleeds publicly for the poor of all nations, finds a $750,000 tax free mansion ordered for his vice presidential comfort by an ADA-controlled majority in the Congress. In Britain, Harold Wilson coolly invites the leaders of Socialist parties from fourteen countries, many like himself already holding top government posts, to meet at Chequers, traditional country home of British prime ministers.

With unintentional humor British newspapers hailed that event as a diplomatic coup—as if Harold Wilson, sometimes accompanied by Hubert Humphrey, had not been meeting on the Continent with the same Socialist leaders for years. Recognizing the revolutionary import of the new locale, Socialist International Information for May, 1965 headlined the conference “Socialist Summit at Chequers.” Even the usually conservative Times of London commented in a leading article on April 26,1965, “If Western Europe is to be led by Socialists, that may prove to have been a very useful beginning.”

As international Socialism, open or disguised, moves steadily into positions of power, its chief spokesmen and political agents present an increasingly bland front to the world. This phenomenon was noted by Zigmunt Zaremba, chairman-in-exile of the Socialist Union of Eastern Europe and a Socialist member of the Polish Parliament before World War II. Attending the Eighth Congress of the Socialist International at Amsterdam in 1963, he reported that “eminent party leaders, one after another, came to the rostrum to express, most cautiously, their parties’ attitude toward important political questions, carefully skirting those questions which were ‘premature.'”

“The Congress,” wrote Zaremba in an article reprinted in the U.S. Socialist quarterly, New Politics (Winter, 1964), “was clearly a gathering of those who held high office in their countries and those who hoped to do so shortly.” (1) And he went on to say:

“Only those questions on which there was already a consensus were brought to the floor for discussion and decision. These included disarmament and aid to the underdeveloped countries. Minor resolutions on France, Spain Russian anti-Semitism, racism and civil rights struggles in the USA, and imprisonment of Socialist leaders by Communist-bloc countries were passed unanimously.

“But behind the facade a whole series of questions was heatedly discussed. From the platform, only Guy Mollet [chairman of the French Socialist Party] touched on the question of the relationship of socialist and Communist movements in the present period. Behind the scenes, however, this question was the central issue of the discussions of the Central European Study Group and the Socialist Union of Eastern Europe.”

For Socialist leaders, using the machinery of universal suffrage to gain and hold political power, special caution appears to be indicated as they round the bend heading toward an international federation of Socialist states. Because deep-rooted sentiments of patriotism, national honor and personal independence still animate a great many voters in a great many countries, every effort must be made by international Socialists to obscure the fact that the political and economic bases for such sentiments are being obliterated as rapidly as possible.

Just as a majority of citizens in the later Roman Empire never realized the Empire had fallen, because the outward forms of imperial government persisted several centuries longer; so the peoples of the so-called Free World are not to be made aware that their world is becoming progressively less free. “Socialism is about equality and freedom,” insists Peter Townsend, chairman of the Fabian Society for 1965-66. (2) But George Bernard Shaw knew better. He knew the role that coercion must play in any Socialist scheme of things, and perhaps Peter Townsend does, too.

Meanwhile, whole populations are being conditioned to regard Socialist norms as normal, in preparation for a day when the leaders may more openly reveal their hands. Practical acceptance of many Socialist programs has been obtained, for the most part, by making shrewdly calculated appeals to the immediate interests of key groups and individuals, appeals which are invariably swathed in high humanitarian phrases. By now this technique has reached a point at which as one cynic observed, humanitarianism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Particularly in England and the United States where the public is indifferent to ideology, the psychological approach is used, as was suggested long ago by the British Fabian, Graham Wallas, in his book The Great Society. Developed in depth over the years by Fabian-inspired researchers, that method has been graded and refined with a view to reaching every level of modern society—labor, business, the professions, the bureaucracy, senior citizens, career-minded youth, even pre-school children. It calls for the permeation of colleges, universities, and religious seminaries by Fabian Socialist-oriented educators and administrators, as well as the introduction of uniform “standards” and “guidelines” into federally financed educational systems. For total effect, it requires total control of communications and entertainment media, a state of affairs already in being, if not in full force.

The professor is still the main channel through which the Fabian Socialist outlook percolates to society at large. As the venerable Walter Lippmann said, in a keynote speech opening “The University in America” Convocation at Los Angeles in May, 1966: “Professors have become in the modem world the best available source of guidance and authority in the field of knowledge . . . There is no other court to which men can turn and find what they once found in tradition and custom. Because modern man in his search for truth has turned away from kings, priests, commissars and bureaucrats, he is left, for better or worse, with the professor.” (3) The gathering which Lippmann addressed that night included some 1,500 persons, among them presidents, deans and faculty members as well as bright students of the leading American universities. It was sponsored and steered by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions—offshoot of an offshoot of the Ford Foundation whose president was Professor McGeorge Bundy, former instructor and guide of American Presidents.

So the long-range plan, artlessly set in motion by a little group of serious thinkers meeting at 17 Osnaburgh Street, London, more than eighty years before and patiently pursued by three generations of respectable Fabian Socialists, moved smoothly toward its destined conclusion. With the clear-cut victory of the Fabian-led Labour Party in the 1966 British elections and the repeated success of the Johnson-Humphrey Administration in pushing one welfare state measure after another through the United States Congress, official cooperation between the two major English-speaking nations for the advancement of Socialism promised to reach new heights. The irony of it was, that as the de facto policies and actions of the heads of state leaned more and more strongly to the Left, their personal reputation for moderation soared.

Although Prime Minister Wilson’s new government contained an even larger percentage of identifiable Fabians than before, (4) he was nearly always described in the general press as a right wing Socialist —really, hardly radical at all. Those hard-core Fabian Socialists who filled the Cabinet and the junior Ministries to the exclusion of simple Labourites presumably served as a kind of Loyal Opposition within the government they operated.

As if to confuse the picture still more, Peter Townsend’s New Year’s Message to the Society had warned the Wilson government against giving an impression of being bogged down by short-term problems at the expense of long-range Socialist objectives. He told Fabians that “they will serve the Government far better as demanding, if sympathetic, critics than as captive apologists.” (5) Since it would be decidedly awkward for members of the Government to take such a stand, one must infer that the chairman’s message was addressed to rank-and-file Fabians in private life. They were urged to bring pressure on their coy leaders to do what the latter eagerly desired but preferred to do as though yielding to popular demand.

On the other side of the Atlantic, President Johnson fathered a whole flock of legislative acts, from Civil Rights to Federal-Aid-to-Education to Medicare, acts which had been plugged for years in both ADA and Socialist Party platforms. He pushed Keynesian-type deficit spending to breathtaking altitudes, and talked of extending the anti-poverty war—by then, costing well over one billion dollars a year at home—to the farthest corners of the earth. In matters of foreign trade and nuclear disarmament he offered fresh concessions to the Soviet bloc; while his alternately hot-and-cold Asian policy aided Moscow in its acrid and often deceptive dialogue with the Chinese Reds. Meanwhile, the “dialogue,” blown up, by Leftist propaganda, to the stature of a “split,” was something from which naive freemen could extract passing comfort.

In a paternal mood, Johnson even commended the United Nations Children’s Fund for having transformed Halloween into “a program of basic training in world citizenship.”(6) And yet Johnson was consistently referred to in the public prints as a moderate with conservative leanings, who basked in the support of the business community.

It is true that a select number of business executives had come to accept the Administration’s post-Keynesian economics, in somewhat the same spirit as the New England transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller, once announced, “I accept the Universe!” Their conversion was due in part to the good offices of the Committee for Economic Development—an admitted affiliate of London’s Fabian-inspired PEP (Political and Economic Planning), which now operated on a world-wide scale to secure the cooperation of management during the current period of peaceful transition to Socialism. Not unnaturally, such business leaders enjoyed Administration favor, and reciprocated with favors of their own in campaign season.

This did not deter LBJ, however, from attempting to shift the blame for looming inflation, provoked by his Administration’s prodigality, on his “friends” of the business community. Sternly the President told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that if businessmen failed to keep rising prices down, they must expect to pay higher wages and higher taxes. It was the smoothest propaganda trick of a political year!

If in some respects, the President taxed the tolerance of his business supporters, his martial gestures in Vietnam proved no less a trial to his backers of the ADA. But they, too, remained sympathetic critics of LBJ, giving him credit for services rendered on the domestic front. In voting at their 1966 convention to disapprove the Administration’s military policy in Vietnam, Americans for Democratic Action denounced the sin while continuing to love the sinner.

No one attending that convention and hearing Vice President Humphrey’s pained defense of the Government’s Vietnam policy doubted that he was really suffering, or failed to interpret his speech as a sacrifice on the altar of political necessity. Behind the scenes, it might well have been pointed out that two of the very same officials who had provoked the Korean War and then maneuvered it to a stalemate were once more directing U.S. Asian policy: Dean Acheson and Dean Rusk. Surely their skills could be relied upon to avert an American victory in Vietnam, if only by the simple device of sending too many troops to the scene and keeping military hardware in short supply.

Had not Rusk already intimated that a happy end-result of the bloodshed in Vietnam could be the eventual recognition of Red China, an event long and earnestly desired by the Fabian-begotten ADA? Although Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. gallantly volunteered to supplant Secretary Rusk as a presidential adviser, his offer was interpreted as a bit of high-level buffoonery—possibly designed to remind fellow-Fabians that any man is replaceable, if not expendable. Whether one graduate or another of the British Fabians’ finishing school process was in charge, in the long run it made little difference, except perhaps to the individuals concerned.

Meanwhile Rhodes Scholars still manned the international ramparts in Washington. Walt Whitman Rostow of MIT’s Center for International Studies (reputed to have been started with $300,000 worth of CIA money) was back at the White House again. Harlan Cleveland held forth as U.S. Ambassador to NATO. On the home front Nicholas deBelleville Katzenbach—who married a daughter of the Phelps Stokes clan, one of the founding families of the Fabian Socialist movement in America—had moved up to first place at the Department of Justice.

Like those other old Oxonians with whom he conferred from time to time in Washington, Britain’s Prime Minister Harold Wilson claimed to support U.S. policy in Vietnam. But it hardly seemed more than lip service, in view of the fact that British merchant vessels docked regularly in North Vietnam ports and British companies engaged in trade with Hanoi. Though the Wilson government procured United Nations authority for the British Navy to seize and search ships on the high seas which were bound for Rhodesia, this privilege was not expected to apply to the Southeast Asian trade.

From the first, Harold Wilson appeared to favor negotiation as a means of ending the Vietnam conflict. His initial peace-feeler took the form of a visit to Hanoi by Harold Davies, M.P., a minor official in the Wilson government. Davies was an admirer of President Ho Chi Minh, who as far back as 1924 declared at a Communist International Congress, “I am a French colonial and a member of the French Communist Party.” (7) On the same occasion Uncle Ho, falsely represented today in Leftist propaganda as leading a national independence movement like George Washington, stated plainly:

“According to Lenin, the victory of the revolution in Western Europe depended on its close contact with the liberation movement against imperialism in enslaved countries and with the national question, both of which form a part of the common problem of the proletarian movement and dictatorship.” (8)

Since those remarks were republished in Hanoi as recently as 1960, there is no reason to believe Ho Chi Minh has changed his stripes from that day to this.

Harold Davies, M.P. could look forward to a warm personal welcome in Hanoi, having written an enthusiastic article about the Northern Republic which appeared in the Left Wing French publication, Horizons, for December, 1957. It was quoted three years later in a little giveaway volume issued by Hanoi’s Foreign Languages Publishing House and rather confusingly entitled The Democratic Republic of Viet Nam, 1945-1960: Impressions of Foreigners (p. 63). When his unofficial peace mission produced no visible results, Davies quietly returned to his post as parliamentary secretary to the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance in London.(9)

So the question of the relationship between the Socialist and Communist movements in the present day—a question that only Guy Mollet of the French Socialist Party had ventured to broach publicly —becomes meaningful for Americans. While on the surface that relationship seems variable enough, its true nature and extent is still one of the best kept secrets of two highly secretive world organizations. Any public statements on the subject by leaders of the twin Internationals may be dismissed as inevitably misleading. Any inferences must be drawn from the facts of history itself, which records again and again the peculiarly protective attitude of the Socialists toward the Communist bloc nations and their agents and the great degree of sustained collaboration.

The Socialist and Communist world movements are like the two faces of a coin—not identical, yet inseparable. Sometimes one side appears uppermost, sometimes the other; but at the core they are still one. Which side of this counterfeit coin might face up at a given time, probably depends upon the circumstances of the moment. It is, of course, to the interest of every man, woman and child in America, desiring personal liberty in a free and sovereign nation, that the fraudulent nature of this coin be recognized and exposed so that we may be forever spared the necessity of making such a spurious choice.

One by one, the costliest and most highly prized nuclear secrets of the United States, on which the peace and safety of the whole Free World depend, have been delivered to the Soviet military clique, as a result of the consistently permissive temper of British and American Fabian Socialists toward Communist activists. Published hearings of the Subcommittee on Internal Security of the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary demonstrate that today, as in the age of Roosevelt, the most elementary security precautions have been scrapped by a Fabian-dominated Administration indisposed to keep Communist operatives from entering the country or to deny them the privileges accorded to loyal American citizens.

At the popular level, it is evident that something resembling the United Front movement of the pre-World War II years has been revived, to exert pressure on Socialist-oriented governments in matters of peace and disarmament. How broad this movement is may be gathered from an International Peace/Disarmament Directory compiled in 1962 by one Lloyd Wilkie of Yellow Springs, Ohio. Without claiming to include the names and addresses of all organizations working in one way or another for “peace,” it lists more than six hundred groups and subgroups throughout the world and more than one hundred periodicals. They include academic, scientific, religious and merely agitational groups, ranging from end to end of the political spectrum.

Of course, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom—founded long ago by the Chicago Socialist Jane Addams and conveniently used as a cover by illegal U.S. Communists in the nineteen-twenties—is there with all its branches. The Council on Foreign Relations is listed, as well as its opposite number in Britain, The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Both the Communist and Socialist Parties USA are named, as well as the ADA; but the two major American political parties are slighted. The Catholic Worker is cited, but the Vatican’s peace efforts are discreetly overlooked.

The author explains he has played no favorites, and suggests that the inquiring reader learn the various shades of difference for himself, by getting in touch with as many of these groups and periodicals as he sees fit. To a casual observer, it is instructive to note how many of the national peace movements in foreign countries are affiliated with the World Council of Peace, chaired in 1962 by Professor J. D. Bernal, 94 Charlotte Street, London W-1. Even to reach the chairman of the Soviet Peace Committee, N. Tikhonov, whose local address was not available at press time, one was referred to the World Council of Peace in London.

While peace is undoubtedly wonderful, the motives of those who organize so-called peace movements and peace demonstrations of varied degrees of violence, are often suspect. In the past as in the present, pacifist groups have been used at critical moments to promote defeatism and to paralyze a nation’s will to defend itself. One of the more striking historical examples was the so-called Bonnet Rouge Conspiracy, in which French Socialists participated during World War I, and which led one French regiment after another to lay down its arms in the face of an advancing enemy.

In the present atomic era the chief effort of international peace and disarmament groups seems to be directed at inducing the United States to renounce its role as an atomic power, thereby leaving the Soviet Union supreme in the field. One can only speculate as to how far the veiled disarmament propaganda, purveyed by such high-level Fabian-inspired agencies as the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Assembly, influenced the nuclear pause proclaimed in 1961 by President Kennedy; or the decision of Secretary McNamara in 1964 to cancel the nuclear strategy of NATO without consulting his European Allies. In the final analysis, World Government under Socialist rulers becomes the pacific sea toward which all tributary movements flow.

With the end so nearly achieved, it seems more than ever unfair that the American people should not be permitted to know the identity of their betrayers. In almost every other country of the Free World, Socialism operates openly as a political party, and frequently is the ruling party. Here in America both the Socialist Party and the Socialist Labor Party are small and weak, and merely serve to delude the public into believing there is little to fear from that quarter. Yet the unseen and unacknowledged Fabian Socialist movement, whose American practitioners call themselves liberals or progressives, has access in the United States to greater sources of wealth and power than anywhere else on earth. It has penetrated multi-billion dollar tax free foundations, and manipulates the U.S. Treasury itself. Precisely because its leaders are not known for what they are, they occupy a great many key posts in government today and act invisibly in union with alien masterminds to dissolve the strength and substance of this nation.

Though the situation is acutely dangerous for a land that was liberty’s true home, it is not necessarily hopeless. The answer was supplied by a relatively unschooled American, General Andrew Jackson, who fought in his own day to make America free and great. Perhaps it is only a legend, unknown to such sophisticated scholars as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., but it became a tradition among professional military men of an earlier era.

Just before the Battle of New Orleans, we are told, an unusually dense fog descended on the fields outside the city, where General Jackson’s army was to make its stand. As he rode out to inspect his ill-equipped troops, a young soldier spoke up.

“But General, sir,” said the boy, “how can I fight and defend myself against an enemy I can’t see?”

“Sooner or later, your enemy will show himself,” replied the General, “and you will know what to do.” Then, looking upward a moment as if for guidance, he added: “And in your future life, if you survive this—and by God, you will!—you will be confronted by many unseen enemies of your hard-fought liberty. But they will show themselves in time—time enough to destroy them.”

Footnotes

1. Italics added, then removed.

2. “Chairman’s Message,” Fabian News (January, 1966). (The author of that Message is not the same Peter Townsend who was once Princess Margaret’s suitor.)

3. Los Angeles Times (May 8, 1966).

4. Fabian News (April-May, 1966), announced there were 28 new Fabian Members of Parliament, and again printed a list of Labour Government appointments which identified present, though not past, members of the Fabian Society. It also listed, under the heading “New Fabian Appointments,” the following:

Dick Marsh, a former member of the Executive Committee and an active member, of the Society’s Trade Union Group, becomes the youngest member of the Cabinet at 38.

Eirene White, a former Chairman of the Society becomes the first woman Foreign Office Minister.

George Thomson, former chairman of the “Venture” Editorial Board, Summer School Director, etc., has been appointed Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, with special responsibility for political negotiations for the entry of the country into the Common Market.

Reg Prentice, another former member of the Executive Committee has become Minister of Works.

5. Fabian News (January, 1966).

6. Congressional Record (March 7, 1966), p. 4829.

7. “Report on the National and Colonial Questions at the Fifth Congress of the Communist International,” Selected Works of Ho Chi Minh (Hanoi, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1960), Vol. I, p. 143.

8. Ibid., pp. 143-144.

9. Davies’ name appears in this connection on the Government appointments lists released by the British Information Service as I. D. 702 (November, 1964 and April, 1966).